Interesting story on Weis, Willingham salaries

Tyrone Willingham may be on the hottest seat of any college football coach in America, but at least it’s a plush one.
This story today from the Fort Wayne (Ind.) Journal Gazette details how Willingham was paid $650,000 by Notre Dame from July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2007 as part of the school’s settlement when it fired him in 2004.
The story says that’s more than the base salary of $598,000 paid to Charlie Weis, making Willingham the second-highest paid employee at Notre Dame for the 2006-07 fiscal year. Weis, however, has all kinds of other compensation as Coaches Hot Seat says that his total salary is $4.2 million a year.
That list puts Willingham’s guaranteed compensation at 39th in the country and fourth in the Pac-10 at $1.47 million per year, behind Pete Carroll ($3.8 million), Mike Bellotti ($2.05 million) and Jeff Tedford ($1.85 million).
Drawing two salaries puts Willingham in a rare category of being among the highest-paid employees at two major universities at the same time. Willingham is the highest-paid employee at UW (which also makes him the highest-paid employee in the state). He can also make about another $400,000 in incentives (though $175,000 is pretty hard to reach as that’s what he would get for winning the BCS title game). You can view his contract here.
So combining his Notre Dame and UW salaries means Willingham pulled in more than $2 million during that fiscal year.
One thing I’d forgotten in reviewing his contract is that it was amended in 2006 to award him $25,000 if the team’s APR number is equal to or greater than “the cutpoint established by the NCAA.” It was, when released earlier this month, making Willingham just a little bit richer.